Marketing Advise to Reach General Comic Audience Vs Niche Market

[Zblock1]

What marketing avenues have you guys had levels of success with?

I was recently turned on to the automated instagram bots and reluctantly signed up for a 3-day trial. I've been posting a frame a day of my work and noticed an immediate increase in activity from my account. What's more, I noticed that my website traction started increasing. What was recently 0 hits per day has increased to around 40. That could be from some clever SEO work on my site pages or it could be from the instagram account. Either way, I'm pretty happy with any traction whatsoever.

The current product is a niche work so I can target a bit more specifically but I'm curious if you have any tips for reaching the general comics audience. If so, please drop a bit of knowledge below. http://tapastic.com/series/Shake-The-Lake or www.northairentertainment.com

[PotooGryphon]

That could be from some clever SEO work on my site pages or it could be from the instagram account.

You can track that if you setup your site with Google Analytics, or even to a lesser extent on Project Wonderful.

Project Wonderful is good for advertising on, you can bid on ad boxes for free or bid a few cents a day. If you find a good similar site to place an ad on on PW then you can get great traction. On a few sites that I bid on, I can reach 200 hits a day with them.

Top Webcomic has been pretty good if you can stay between the top 300 spots on the list.

Livestreaming is the BEST way to engage with readers and have fun with them. I've also received random followers that found me through surfing picarto.

Guest comics, fan art, and doing event/collabs with fellow comic creator does amazing at reaching new readers.

All these methods get a mix of General comic audience and niche. For reaching a more general comic audience I recommend comic conventions, joining comic communities (like #webcomicchat and #comictalk on Twitter), and entering art contests.

So much to do, an artist's job is never done ^_^

[bouncyegg]

I use Google Analytics which I find useful to track where my visitors are coming from.

Being active on social media, including Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. will help. Lately, I feel like I've been trying to market more than actually draw.

Good luck!

http://tapastic.com/series/thebouncyegg

[DTSaranya]

As others have said, google analytics will help you understand your traffic.

I'm active on a few sites, but reddit is by far the most traffic-generating per post. I've also had a bunch of people show up on my site recently saying that they've found me on 9gag. I don't have an account there, so I assume that either someone else is posting them there, or the site grabs from reddit.

As far as I can tell, reddit is the best ticket to reaching more people. I use the webcomic and comic subreddits, and may give /r/funny a try once I've optimized my site better.

[bouncyegg]

Agreed about Reddit, although many times you'll get a burst in traffic that's not always long lasting. I also use the r/comics and r/webcomics although they seem to prefer quick, funny comics. r/funny gets a lot of traffic; however, they don't allow Tumblr posts which stinks for me since my main site (bouncyegg.com) is on Tumblr.

http://tapastic.com/series/thebouncyegg

[DTSaranya]

Yeah - the traffic spike never sticks, of course. It does, however, affect the traffic of the coming week. I post to reddit on Sundays, and the amount of traffic I then get during the week will be proportionate to the success of the reddit post, plus the base users who seem to return regardless.

This week, for some reason, the slow day traffic has been around triple what it usually is despite the last reddit post not having done particularly well. I can't pinpoint what happened, even with analytics, but I guess more traffic is a good thing so I shouldn't question it. :/

[dglisson]

@bouncyegg Some good subreddits to go to for longform webcomics are r/storycomics, r/LongformWebcomics, r/narrativecomics, and the new r/Webcomicbooks. They don't get nearly as much traffic as r/funny or r/comics, but I've gotten decent traction there for my main site.

[bouncyegg]

I've never heard of those. Thanks for the info!

http://tapastic.com/series/thebouncyegg

[Zblock1]

r/narrativecomics

Yeah. I have to admit that Reddit was never on my radar for long because I always felt that the community was so unforgivably hostile. I'll give it another go and let you all know what happens.